President Rafael Correa ratified on Monday, January 30, 2017 that he will retire from active politics on May 24, after ten years of office.

“Yes, I’m going to withdraw from politics. Hopefully it is definitely,” the president said in response to the questions he was asked in a keynote address on economics at the Complutense University of Madrid. The president said he expects that this retirement “would be for a few years at least,” although he said he does not like to talk about definitive things.

“Change processes must be necessary; nobody should be indispensable,” he said. “The revolution (citizen revolution as called by the current government) must continue with another leadership,” he contended, in relation to the elections of February 19 in Ecuador, in which eight candidates will succeed him, among them Lenin Moreno, representative of the ruling party.

Correa will leave his post on May 24 and will thus fulfill a mandate of ten consecutive years, the highest recorded in the Ecuadorian history. He then plans to move to Brussels, Belgium, where he owns a department and where his wife Anne Malherbe lives.